by Glen Armstrong
It has barbs but doesn’t cling,
seeps through one’s shoes
like puddle water.
It once slowed down to listen
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Category: Words
LA Live
by Ebony Haywood
After sunset— after parking meters doze to sleep, after attorneys in starched suits snap their suitcases shut, after happy hour at City Tavern and rush hour traffic on Broadway, after tired fathers in high-rise condos feed, bathe, and tuck their children into bed— there is energy: emerging from the warm concrete to electrify the air across Figueroa, Wilshire, and Olympic, the heart of Downtown Los Angeles. I feel this energy pulsing through the lights of The Staples Center, swarming with Kings Hockey fans donning oversized black and white jerseys. Outside the Regal Movie Theater, men in their blue jeans and women in their high heels, looking awkward, await their dates. I see their eyes brighten and then avert with acute embarrassment from the gazes of passersby who don’t wave and smile back.
Read More »The Person Whose Face I’ve Taken
by Seohyun Ryu
Stranger
held me with only one hand
“who are you” i cried
she whistled “i am you but smaller and weaker”
Read More »Turning Disasters Off: Backyard Edition
by Terry Trowbridge
You can’t cut back on funding! You will regret this!
– Transportation Advisor, SimCity 2000
Platonic Love
by Jess Whetsel
There is a room in my heart
that only you can enter. You forged
a key from curiosity and devotion, tied it
‘round your neck with fishing line, but still
you knock first, let me open the door.
I welcome you in with a checkerboard grin.
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2 poems
Quote of the Week, #15
I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you. …
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? …
And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. …
We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
– Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (as found in the book Sister Outsider)
2 poems
by Solape Adetutu Adeyemi
I think my wings may mend hereRead More »
And maybe I could learn to fly again
Well, sometimes…
by L. A. Ballesteros Gentile
There’s so much in it—the word sometimes: nostalgia and yearning and tenderness and regret… And so simple, too, so obvious: two four-letter words past the stage of hyphenation that portmanteaus often travel in fright.
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